Year of the missing candidate

With a month left until the midterm elections, there is something noticeably absent from some key statewide races: the candidates.

They’re ducking public events, refusing to publicize the ones they do hold and skipping debates and national TV interviews altogether – out of fear of a gotcha moment that will come back to haunt them.

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It’s mostly, but not entirely, a Republican phenomenon. In some cases, a tea-party-oriented candidate has made a plain calculation that a one-day, process story about an absence from the campaign trail or a refusal to debate is less damaging than the captured-on-tape gaffe the candidate could make when facing reporters.

As of Friday, Colorado Republican Senate hopeful Ken Buck had gone nine consecutive days without holding a public event and acknowledged to The Denver Post that he’s more mindful now that he’s constantly being recorded by the ubiquitous 'trackers' being used by both sides. (With the fundraising quarter now done, however, he’s planning a more robust schedule for October.)

Tea party darlings Rand Paul of Kentucky and Christine O’Donnell of Delaware both surged to primary victories thanks, in part, to national media exposure, but after their own comments got them into trouble, they abruptly canceled post-primary Sunday show appearances and have largely avoided doing non-Fox national TV.

But what’s more remarkable is that they’ve also taken a low profile in their own states. Paul once asked local reporters to submit questions in writing and often hurries to his car to avoid them.

O’Donnell has been nearly impossible to track down in Delaware since winning her primary last month and actually had to deny Friday that she was in hiding.

“You should definitely expect to see a lot more,” she vowed to The Associated Press at a campaign event that, the Wilmington News Journal reported, was by invitation.

The lengths to which some of the hopefuls have gone — such as refusing to release public schedules to local reporters — have astounded veteran political observers and sparked a debate over whether the year of the missing candidate marks a new era in which statewide contenders will be as guarded as presidential aspirants.

So rather than present the opportunity for an encounter that might later surface in an opponent’s TV ad, the candidates prefer to risk an image of them fleeing cameras and shouted questions as protective aides whisk them into the safety of a waiting car.

Call it the political equivalent of Dean Smith’s “Four Corners” offense: As the election grows near, and some of the media-shy candidates draw close in the polls, they’re effectively running out the clock.